The Sandbox was originally a traditional sandbox game. Starting to explore the blockchain version in 2018, the team has extensive experience in game development and marketing operations. From the product design point of view, compared with Decentraland, The Sandbox’s gameplay and economic model have been improved and innovative, and the game attributes are stronger. The Sandbox is expected to open in the near future and has great development potential and is worthy of attention.
Investment summary
Sandbox games are a category of games that have a relatively wide audience. The most popular sandbox games in traditional games are “Minecraft” and “Mini World”, which can achieve tens of millions of daily active users. Decentraland is the first project to create a blockchain version of the sandbox game, capturing the first batch of users through a series of activities. The Sandbox is a latecomer to sandbox games/blockchain virtual real estate, with development potential and competitiveness.
In addition, The Sandbox belongs to the meta-universe sector. It has the advantages of transparency of game assets, the ability of players to cash in games, and the freedom of players to explore and trade. Although The Sandbox and Decentraland belong to both meta-universe and sandbox. But The Sandbox has stronger game attributes, and Decentraland is currently more inclined to develop in the direction of online parties and gathering places. In the short term, the direction of the game may be more areas where user data growth can be achieved.
The Sandbox team has strong development and operational capabilities
- The Sandbox was originally a traditional blockchain game. Starting to explore the blockchain version in 2018, the team has rich experience in game development and operation marketing. In the past 2 years or so, it has been able to deliver the set goals and tasks.
- Animoca Brands, the holding company of The Sandbox, has multiple blockchain game subsidiaries/teams. The holding company can provide support and assistance to the operation of the subsidiaries.
- Since the operation of the team, partners include Atari and other well-known game developers, and have cooperated with many well-known IPs. Co-branding with IP has the opportunity to attract non-blockchain users, achieve the effect of “out of the circle”, and have relatively strong marketing capabilities.
- The user experience of existing products is relatively friendly.
The economic model design of The Sandbox is relatively reasonable. Compared with the leading Decentraland, The Sandbox has improvements and innovations in the design mechanism.
- Anyone can create and sell The Sandbox’s NFT assets and games, which increases the profitability of ordinary users and expands the user base.
- NFT assets have increased certain attributes and rarity, and need to pledge SAND or use SAND to purchase them, which expands the gameplay of NFT.
- In the future, the assets of the foundation will be rewarded to game users through liquid mining methods such as Play-to-Earn, which will increase economic incentives and attract potential users.
The Sandbox is currently under development, and the final virtual world/sandbox world is not yet available, and many gameplays are still written plans. The actual effect cannot be known until the formal implementation.
Players can currently only use Game Maker and VoxEdit to create NFTs and games, and they can also explore the interface in GameMaker. However, the virtual world entrance has not yet been opened. The team announced in October that the Sandbox Alpha entry point, Mainhub, will soon be opened.
Since The Sandbox is still in the early stages of development, according to the development history of similar products Decentraland, we need to pay attention to the following points:
- The common problem of virtual reality platforms is the separation of land ownership and creation rights, and there is a lot of artificial hype in the NFT market. People who bought a large amount of land may not have the will to spend a lot of energy on building the internal ecology, and those who have the will/capacity to create have no land and cannot enrich the ecology, which leads to most of the vacancies in the virtual reality platform. The Sandbox may also When this happens, it will affect the user experience and make it difficult to improve user retention.
- The economic model of virtual reality is still being explored and has not really developed. As far as existing sandbox games are concerned, it is difficult to increase the number of users. In addition to the increase in the price of land caused by token appreciation, it is difficult for land holders to obtain additional income, which will also reduce users’ willingness to purchase land and other NFTs.
Overall, The Sandbox deserves attention.